"Donald Westlake - SH5 - Hitch Your Spaceship To A Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

“Well, there's your captain,” Hank said. “Tall, skinny, distracted fella. A Pisces. And his number two, a
nice young boy but not too quick upstairs-probably a Moon Child. Moony, anyway.”

“Show-off,” Jim said. He was still smarting over his fiver.

Hank went on, pretending not to notice. “Then there's your navigator---“

“Astrogator.”

“Same thing, just gussied up. A highly motivated young person, probably female.”

“Not yet,” Ensign Benson muttered.

“But definitely Virgo.”

“That I’ll go along with.”

“Now, your engineer,” Hank went on, “a solid Taurus, but we just can’t decide if it’s a man or a woman.

“Nobody can,” Ensign Benson said.

“I heard that,” Hester said, coming out onto the platform to shake a wrench at the ensign. “I’m a woman,
and don't you forget it.”

“Why not?”

“Come on, folks,” Hank said, gesturing toward town. “You’ve had a long, hard journey; come along and
relax.”

The captain, the lieutenant and the astrogator joined the three other earthlings on the platform and they all
looked off toward town. A pretty little place with peaked roofs, a traditional white steeple and a sports
ground alive with running, yelling children, it nestled in a setting of low hills where neat farms mingled with
elm groves, the whole area very much like bits of Devon and Kent-the parts beyond commuting distance
from London. "What a nice place,” Pam said, her slide rule for one instant forgotten.

“You’ll learn to love it,” Hank assured them, “in time.”



“Chick, chick, Nero,” Jim said as Hank explained to the Earthers, “Our energy sources are really very
slender. No oil, no coal. Hydropower and solar power give us enough electricity to run our homes and
businesses, but there was no way we could keep powered transportation. Fortunately, there were
several indigenous animals capable of domestication, including the like of old Nero here.”

Nero, a gray-and-white creature that might very well pass for a horsy steed in the dusk with the light
behind it was apparently quite strong; without effort it pulled this ten-seater surrey and its eight
passengers along the gently up-and-down crushed-stone road toward the town. A farmer in a nearby
field, plowing behind another Nero, waved; Hank and Jim and Billy and Hester waved back.

“Have any birds here?” the captain asked.